Epistle from inside the Sharknado

You might call it God; might witness the weather’s
disjointed volition, and figure it biblical payback
for all your long decades of self-defeating industry:
the gases in the atmosphere, the poison in the water.
And you might stand on your lawn in your shorts,
running a scream up a flagpole; sniffing catastrophe’s
rank surfeit on the bilious air. You might, for all I
know. For all I care you could be crouching in
rainy basements, debating plague or commies with
the cans of beans; courting immortality with forward
planning until your lungs fill up with sand like canvass
punching bags. It means nothing to me, the human
world: humourless delinquencies, the corkscrew
politics of plunder and of blame; victims of this or
that, rolling a moistened eye to camera. I see you,
surrounded by dripping debris, in the local anchor’s
sallow limelight, angling and righteous. Nuke
the sharks! It will not save you. I will come again.
We will come, seismic and genderless, thick sleeves
of meat, working the humid air like a grudge. You’d
better run. You’d better equip yourself with guns,
and chainsaws, consult a TV psychic, burn your
money, shave your head, sell your kids, anything at
all. I am coming round again. We are coming,
driven by insomnia’s deficient logics, our no-
escape velocity. You will know us by the shine
of our endangered Kevlar; my exoskeletal corset
rips your fingers into kelp. You might call it God,
but it’s not God. The sky is singing with Nature’s
maniac gusto. It’s the only game in town. Come,
hurtle over the swooning horizon, stare into my
flat-screen eye, and tell me, human, it is not so.

About this poem

From the judges: "A virtuosic, gnarly message of doom, direct from the mouth of whatever force it is that might choose to catalyse the human apocalypse by sending down a plague of great white sharks propelled by extreme weather conditions. The poem might take its surreal logic from the Sharknado films, but the voice from inside the Sharknado itself is totally original, and it threatens us because it’s our voice, a human voice and it’s totally our fault. 'Epistle from inside the Sharknado' is a brilliant, disturbing and, I think, deadly serious eco-poem: a, dark, absurd warning shot aimed at the equally absurd and self-destructive culture that produced it." - Jack Underwood

Fran Lock is a sometime itinerant dog whisperer and author of three poetry collections, Flatrock (Little Episodes, 2011) The Mystic and the Pig Thief (Salt, 2014), and Dogtooth (Out Spoken Press, 2017). Her work has most recently appeared in The Mechanics' Institute Review, POETRY, The Poetry Review, The Rialto, and in Best British Poetry 2015. She is the winner of the 2014 Ambit Poetry Competition, the 2015 Out Spoken Poetry Prize, and the 2016 Yeats Poetry Prize. She won third prize and was commended in the National Poetry Competition 2014 and 2015 respectively. She was recently highly commended by the Forward Prize and appears in the Forward Prize Anthology 2017. She is currently undertaking a practice based Ph.D at Birkbeck in contemporary poetry.